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Claiborne County, Mississippi is home to the Grand Gulf Nuclear Generating Station operated by Entergy. Having one of those things in the neighborhood is a little nerve wracking. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency defines a plume exposure pathway zone and a larger ingestion pathway zone in the vicinity of the plant, in the event something goes really wrong. On the upside, a power plant could mean a lot of tax revenue and Claiborne County shows up on lists as one of the poorest counties in the country.

Only under Mississippi law a county doesn't get to tax a nuclear power plant. The state taxes the plant and divvies up the money among counties in the plant's service area. Some residents claim that the reason for that law is that Claiborne County, home to Mississippi's only nuclear power plant, has a population that is over 80% African American. That was what the lawsuit Doss v Claiborne County Board of Supervisors was all about. Spoiler alert - it did not go well for the disgruntled residents. As is common in these sort of cases, they foundered on the rock of standing.

The Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Plant is pictured with the flooding Mississippi river in the background in Grand Gulf, Miss., Tuesday, May 17, 2011. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

Some History

Claiborne County has significance in the history of the civil rights movement. In 1966, African American citizens of Port Gibson, the county seat, started a boycott of white merchants which was suspended after the City hired its first black police officer. Police shooting in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination rebooted the boycott with leadership from the NAACP and Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers, who had been murdered in 1963. NAACP liability for collateral violence associated with the boycott ended up at the United States Supreme Court, which overturned a Mississippi judgment of $1.2 million against NAACP in 1982.

During his campaign, Doss promised to establish a "fair and equal tax for all county residents," and when he took office, the organizers initiated and effort to reassess and equalize the community's property tax system. In keeping with their pattern, whites reacted with fierce opposition. The outgoing tax assessor specifically warned Doss not to alter the existing assessments, and the board of supervisors drastically cut Doss's operating budget to roughly half that of comparable counties. ........................ Doss and his associates determined that blacks were being inequitably taxed and estimated that the overall assessment was bout two-thirds of the correct value.

“I’m not a plaintiff, but I’m supporting them 250 percent,” said Evan Doss Jr., who personally served notice of the suit to Claiborne County supervisors, who are among multiple defendants. His wife, Emma R. Ross, is among multiple plaintiffs.

The law that stripped Claiborne County of its ability to tax the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant was challenged in the eighties and went up to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Ironically, the Claiborne County Board of Supervisors was one of the plaintiffs in that case. The law had required a constitutional amendment, which seems to have consumed most of the Mississippi Supreme Court's attention in Burrell v Mississippi State Tax Commission. They did not get into the racial issues, but left an intriguing opening.

For the reasons enumerated below, we find in state law no legal infirmity in the scheme devised. Taxpayers residing in Grand Gulf's home county, however, have asserted claims to relief under federal law, claims which ought be heard and decided on their merits someday, somewhere. As the federal courts have declined subject matter jurisdiction, we remand with instructions that Taxpayers' federal claims be heard within the concurrent jurisdiction of the Chancery Court. (Emphasis added)

Almost thirty years later and someday has not yet arrived. The Burrell plaintiffs allowed their federal claim to be dismissed with prejudice in exchange for a $2 million payment to the county.